Dell Appoints Jeff Boudreau To Lead Server, Storage And HCI Charge

‘He is by far the person who has embraced the change and led change and has helped us rebuild this organization into the innovation juggernaut that we have become and will be in the future,’ says Jeff Clarke, vice chairman, Dell Technologies.

Dell Technologies’ vice chairman Jeff Clarke is handing over the reins of the company’s massive $37 billion Infrastructure Solutions Group to storage veteran Jeff Boudreau, who plans to “accelerate” innovation across Dell’s server, storage, networking and hyper-converged portfolio.

“We want to accelerate the innovation engine across the board,” said Boudreau, the new president of Dell Technologies’ Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), in an interview with CRN. “We want to have the best and industry leading technologies within the stack. So think of that physical layer, but then also we’re looking across to fill in the seams.”

Boudreau is a 21-year Dell EMC veteran who started out as a college intern doing shipping/receiving for EMC in the 1990s before officially joining the storage leader in 1998. Over the next two decades, Boudreau worked his way up the latter to become president and general manager for Dell EMC storage, where he is responsible for the company’s global multi-billion storage business.

[Related: HPE Gains Server Market Share In Heated Battle With Dell]

Boudreau is now the president of Dell’s ISG Group which includes the world’s largest server, storage and hyper-converged infrastructure businesses as well as the company’s data protection and networking portfolio. He plans to accelerate innovation across the portfolio with data management and data mobility being key areas of investment.

“If you think about workload portability, data mobility, data management as the data era expands, you’re going to see a ton of innovation in those spaces from us,” Boudreau said. “So really how do we fill in these seams? How do we make sure that our customers can leverage their data and have the right data in the right place and the right SLA? So you’re going to see a lot more innovation across the integrated stack.”

Clarke spent the past two years leading and completely restructuring the ISG Group in terms of both product innovation and operationally.

“We’ve made a lot of progress in the last two years setting up a wonderful foundation for Jeff to accelerate,” said Clarke in an interview with CRN. “The progress we’ve made, that foundation that we build that made me sit back and reflect that, now it’s time to hand the reigns over to Jeff to continue the work we’ve done, put his fingerprints on it, and continue the progress in our ISG business across the board.”

Clarke said Boudreau has fully embraced the changes in Dell’s ISG business and played a leading role in the evolution of the company’s now market-leading storage business.

“He’s the best candidate. He is by far the person who has embraced the change and led change and has helped us rebuild this organization into the innovation juggernaut that we have become and will be in the future,” said Clarke. “I’ve counted on Jeff’s leadership. I’ve counted on him for being an advocate of change. When I went into this job two years ago, it wasn’t an organization that wanted to make change. I forced a lot of change inside the organization and Jeff has been a key leader -- the key leader by far in [Dell EMC’s facility] Hopkinton, Mass., and has been significant in driving the change agenda. It makes perfect sense for him to be that natural continuity between me sitting in that role and Jeff taking him up.”

Clarke made it clear that he “isn’t going anywhere” with still a lot on his plate as vice chairman of Dell Technologies, including leading the company’s Client Solutions Group and fostering more integration between the seven brands of Dell Technologies.

On the partner front, Boudreau said he plans to work more closely with Dell Technologies channel chief Joyce Mullen.

“I’m looking to really align strongly with Joyce [Mullen] in the channel and really build out some of the relationships I’ve had from my traditional EMC side with some of the enterprise customers,” said Boudreau. “To me, it goes back to the customer, and obviously that channel partner is a customer. The relationships I’ve had have been being were in the midrange [market] where we did 70 percent or 80 percent of the volume through the channel. I want to continue to build that out. I want to work with Joyce and work with the different partners to really build on those relationships.”

For Dell’s second fiscal quarter 2020, the company reported revenue of $23.4 billion, up 2 percent year over year. Dell’s ISG revenue was down 7 percent year over year to $8.6 billion, which included a 12 percent decrease year over year in servers and networking sales. The company blamed the second quarter server shortfall on a significant drop in China.

On the ISG innovation front, Dell recently made available what it touts as the industry’s first fully managed on-premises Data Center-as-a-Service offering with the Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service, delivered as VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. Additionally, the company this week completely redesigned its Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with AMD’s second-generation EPYC Rome processors targeting emerging workloads such as high-performance computing.

Boudreau said he plans to accelerate these types of innovation across ISG.

“If you think across ISG, truly being better together and how do we get more leverage across the entire stack -- if that’s either in a three-layer architecture or a converged or hyper-converged solution -- to really being able to delver what our customer needs are in the market,” said Boudreau.